On the night of the 27 February 1933 and 28 February 1933, someone set the Reichstag building on fire. This was the building where the German Parliament held their meetings. The Nazis blamed the communists. Opponents of the Nazis said that the Nazis themselves had done it to come to power. On the very same day, an emergency law called Reichstagsbrandverordnung was passed. The government claimed it was to protect the state from people trying to hurt the country. With this law, most of the civil rights of the Weimar Republic did not count any longer. The Nazis used this against the other political parties. Members of the communist and social-democratic parties were put into prison or killed.

The Nazis became the biggest party in the parliament. By 1934, they managed to make all other parties illegal. Democracy was replaced with a dictatorship. Adolf Hitler became leader (Führer) of Germany.

The Nazis made alliances with other European countries, such as Finland and Italy. Every other European country that allied with Germany did it because they did not want to be taken over by Germany. By alliances and invasions, the Nazis managed to control much of Europe.

In the Holocaust, millions of Jews, as well as Roma people (also called "Gypsies"), people with disabilities, homosexuals, political opponents, and many other people were sent to concentration camps and death camps in Poland and Germany. The Nazis killed millions of these people at the concentration camps with poison gas. The Nazis also killed millions of people in these groups by forcing them to do slave labor without giving them much food or clothing. In total, 11 million people died- 6 million of them Jews.

There has not been a Nazi state since 1945, but there are still people who believe in those ideas. These people are often called neo-Nazis, (which means new-Nazis). Here are some examples of modern Nazi ideas:

After the war, laws were made in Germany and other countries, especially countries in Europe, that make it illegal to say the Holocaust never happened. Sometimes they also ban questioning the number of people affected by it, which is saying that not so many people were killed as most people think. There has been some controversy over whether this affects people's free speech. Certain countries, such as Germany, Austria, and France also ban the use of Nazi symbols to stop Nazis from using them.

↑The first supplemental decree of the Nuremberg Laws extends the prohibition on marriage or sexual relations between people who could produce "racially suspect" offspring. A week later, the minister of the interior interprets this to mean relations between "those of German or related blood" and Roma (Gypsies), blacks, or their offspring. http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007695